This may help explain why the president wants Chuck Hagel as his Secretary of Defense.
President Obama is poised to sign off on a new internal review of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy that would reduce the arsenal by one-third, resulting in billions in savings to the Pentagon and Energy Department.
The recommended reductions were included in a draft version of a classified decision directive compiled by top defense and national security officials inside the White House, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity issued Friday.
While the president has yet to officially approve the directive, including the recommended one-third cut to the nuclear arsenal, sources tell CPI Obama has voiced no objection to the directive’s findings.
Representatives from State Department, Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of Vice President Biden also played a part in drafting the directive.
Things in Washington DC may be fucked up and bullshit, but progress is still being made.
President Obama wants Chuck Hagel at defense because they work well together, Obama respects Hagel, Obama wants to cut the DoD with a Republican as a shield — especially the nuclear arsenal, a goal shared by Hagel — and most of all, Obama trusts Hagel, and Hagel trusts Obama. That trust is very important.
Off topic, but did anyone else feel, erm, bad? about Bush’s paintings being hacked? He clearly just has no friends and is walled up at his compound by himself. But it’s just so sad and pathetic…
I did not feel bad for Bush.
Yeah I had to keep asking myself what’s wrong with me, but I couldn’t help it lol. Especially because I’ve always pictured him as a grown child.
That’s because he is a child by all known measures. Adults take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
If Bush is more embarrassed by his terrible leaked paintings than by what he did to this country and to the world, then that is really saying something.
But it sounds like the Senate Republicans hate his guts. Hagel’s, I mean. We already know beyond a doubt that the hate Obama’s.
Maybe, but the public will once again hate Republicans for it. It’s a lose-lose for them, and Obama knows it. Moreover, they’re getting far too comfortable with their overreaching Zionism that they don’t realize how ridiculous they sound to the rest of the public. I can’t imagine the NYT penning an op-ed in support of BDS’ freedom at a university, even 5 years ago. Things are changing, yet they continue to overreach.
I do feel a littl sorry for him even though he actually bullied me when I was 10 and he was about 30 and I would be justified in enjoying this.
I thought the tub self portrait was like Frida Kahlo minus the talent and imagination. And the shower one was just creepy. He wasn’t looking in the mirror so the reflection was bizarre–almost like it was another person.
But I am curious as to why he chose to be naked–and partially concealed.
I didn’t feel bad for him until others spoke, on other sites, about their sympathy or pity or whatever. W is a hard guy to feel much empathy for. He’s such a pitiless brat and I don’t know that he particularly cares what anyone thinks about him anyway. Or rather he has an inflated view of himself and he doesn’t get the way others see him. Besides which, he has plenty of fans. Not us and not the teasters, not a high percentage of Americans, but still way more friends and hangers on than any of the rest of us, so he exists in that bubble and is probably quite comfy.
The paintings struck me as extremely immature. I noticed others saw Matisse or Picasso. I didn’t see that at all. I saw bored, spoiled kid trying to carve our something his own (and failing, once again, miserably). That’s what left me feeling some compassion for Georgie. As repugnant as he is, it could not have been easy growing up in the shadow of his father and grandfather.
I find the situation weird and sad and pathetic, really don’t like his paintings being hacked though
So who needs Hagel? To legitimize it? I hope not. That just feeds the meme that the dirty hippy Democrats want to disarm America, but IOKIYAR.
I’m sure the arsenal can be reduced 50% and I’m a former Cold Warrior. Unless we are willing to nuke China into oblivion (which would be very bad for the West Coast, at least), all we need is enough to hurt them enough to not start a Nuclear Exchange. If and when they start deploying anti-missile technolgy that will change. We have a treaty with Russia that reduces the number of counter-force targets so that number goes down, too. I didn’t read the link so I don’t know if tactical nukes are included, but I think we need very very few unless we are willing to use them in a first strike against a non-nuclear enemy. That is a political decision, but I have a gut feeling that even if the answer is “yes”, we don’t need the number we have.
Is this part of the new START treaty or in additional to those reductions?
Good question. The Hill article frames it without reference to the recently signed START treaty. I hope it is a unilateral move to restart arms reduction.
I think it’s unilateral, but that’s OK. After all, why store and guard very dangerous weapons if you don’t need them? START was about reducing weapons that were needed as long as the other side had that many too.
It’s in addition. Russians could conceivably balk on renegotiation on their end, which could stall implementation.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/08/obama_embraces_big_nuke_cuts?page=0,0
I think the problem is the Republicans, not the Russians. Obama and Putin could negotiate this down and the GOP would filibuster ratification.
Interesting that this gets leaked before Hagel’s grilling. Think it will get the GOP members off of Benghazi? I don’t either.
My guess is that the source of the leak to the Hill is not a happy camper with this and wanted to use it against Hagel and whoever Obama nominates for Secretary of Energy. Or is this a balloon to see how far he can go. Majorly what it does is completely reverse W’s policy although the 2010 National Security Strategy took baby steps in this direction.
It is the right thing to do, practically and strategically. If Putin reciprocates, the two of them can walk down arms reductions without having to go through Congress to the point at which they can involve China, UK, and France. And possibly India and Pakistan. Israel and North Korea are special and difficult cases.
Movement in this direction makes negotiation with Iran slightly easier and can, if US domestic politics allows, Obama to walk back the Iranian nuclear crisis. The key to US domestic politics is going to have to be the discipline of the Democratic caucus.
What this means is that there will be nuclear materials being reprocessed into fuel rods for domestic power production. Niger will lose a lot of future business for their uranium mines. The uranium rush in the US (like in Virginia) will be squelched. And electricity in the US will get cheaper for a while.
And the cuts are all on the military side of the budget allowing fulfillment of that part of the sequester. Interesting bargaining position there.
Overall, this is welcome news.
Maybe I’m being radical but I think we can safely do it regardless of what Putin does, barring his starting another nuclear arms race.
I think you’re right. But it gives Putin room to maneuver to reciprocate.
You are assuming peaceful intentions from Putin, while I do not.
Wow, what an unprecedented story! Truly historical! It’s not like the US has reduced its nuclear stockpile by 95% in my lifetime or something. That would suggest that this is all part of a known continuum instead of an Unbelievably Brave Decision of Wisdom and Vision the likes of which have never been seen by man before.
Property still isn’t theft, either.
Buncha sellout.
I’m sorry that an objective, progressive understanding of history renders certain events unremarkable, yet still morally praiseworthy. Nuclear disarmament long preceded the Obama administration, and its completion will occur under a different administration some day in the indeterminate future. You are witnessing neither the beginning nor the end of anything.
Fear not, your zealotry will somehow survive I’m sure. Have a wonderful evening.
An objective, progressive understanding of history would recognize that the process you were describing came to a screeching halt in the first year of the Bush administration, and was only restarted when Obama came to office.
There are those in the arms-reduction community, generally seen as progressive, who consider Obama’s actions in this area to be noteworthy.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html
YMMV, of course.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug08/trebes.html)
When even the Bush administration, with its neoconservative warmaking, antagonism towards Russia, and openness to restore nuclear testing, still somehow manages to oversee a 50% reduction in our nuclear stockipile…if that doesn’t make you believe that gradual nuclear disarmament has been a consistent bipartisan policy of the US government for like 35 years, I just don’t know. I don’t get the appeal of rejecting such blatant empirical reality.
And then the preening appeal to authority with the Nobel prize committee, god, that is just everything I hate about you rolled into one comprehensive post of fail.
Barack Obama reduced our nuclear force posture. Welcome news. So did pretty much all of his predecessors in my lifetime, except, I think (weirdly enough) Bill Clinton. We live in a country with a continuous history of record, not one that started in 2009.
And then the preening appeal to authority with the Nobel prize committee, god, that is just everything I hate about you
I’ll have to make sure I do it more than.
I love how much it bothers you that any reference to people respecting Barack Obama makes you act like this.
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
You’re right, it couldn’t have been that you were ass-ignorant and using the opinion of some unrelated Norwegian people to try and cover for it.
President Obama neither invented nuclear disarmament nor is he its foremost historical practitioner. Nor even did he save it from the trashheap of history. Only to those who psychological need for every thing he does to be the Biggest, Bravest, Most Unprecedented Act in the History of Western Civilization, instead of just another iteration in a pattern of events (that again, is morally praiseworthy just without creaming yourself over it!), would be irritated to be reminded that nuclear disarmament is a consistent action of most every administration going back decades. We once had an insane amount of nukes. Every year we try to have fewer of them. One day we will have zero. The end.
You’d swear he has no peers or contemporaries, nor resembles any person who’s ever existed ever. He has reinvented history as we know it…
George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents of all time. But if even he–somebody who very publicly did not believe in nuclear abolition!!!–authorized a reduction in arms, you know the stockpile is impractically and irresponsibly large and its gradual disarmament a noncontroversial tenet held by pretty much every national security political actor in memory.
The idea that the President would need Hagel’s “help” (on anything, ever, actually) is ridiculous. Sometimes news stories are just there to keep you abreast of current events, and not representative of some groundbreaking transformation that will change the way you think about the world forever.